It may have taken a mutual friend three years to set up Noelle Jasmine Kennedy-White with Charles Joseph Mahoney IV, but the moment they finally met, in the fall of 2017, they knew they were meant to be together.
“From the start, we had an incredible connection,” said Mr. Mahoney, 30, an associate specializing in labor and employment law at O’Melveny & Myers, a law firm in New York.
“Noelle was beautiful and intelligent,” said Mr. Mahoney, who graduated from N.Y.U. and received a law degree from Columbia. “She was also someone I could count on. We have a shared interest in the world — there isn’t one thing we can’t talk about.”
Ms. Kennedy-White, 31, a founding partner of Naranji, a Manhattan-based online retailer of cooking spices, didn’t realize what she was missing out on during those years she failed to meet Mr. Mahoney.
“Our mutual friend tried several times to play matchmaker, but the timing was never right,” said Ms. Kennedy-White, who graduated from Georgetown and received a master’s degree in teaching from the Relay Graduate School of Education in New York.
“I remember our mutual friend calling me about Charles when I was 24,” she said, “but I was kind of busy making plans to leave New York at that time, so nothing happened.”
She took a teaching job in Taiwan and when she returned to New York three years later, their mutual friend picked up where she had left off.
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“When she called this time, I had gone on a couple of really bad dates since I had last spoken to her,” Ms. Kennedy-White said. “This time, when she asked me about meeting Charles, I said, ‘Well, yeah, why not, let’s give it a try.’” Her attitude, she said, was “If it works out, great, and if it doesn’t, that’s fine as well; I’m just not going to date anymore.”
Luckily, their mutual friend had been right all along.
Ms. Kennedy-White and Mr. Mahoney hit it off on a first date at a Manhattan restaurant in October 2017 and began dating immediately. As Ms. Kennedy-White put it, “He checked every single box possible.”
The ensuing months were busy for Ms. Kennedy-White, who began teaching at the Browning School in New York upon her return from Taiwan, and then got to work on her spices business.
She and Mr. Mahoney became engaged on Valentine’s Day weekend in February 2021. On Sept. 18, they were married before the Rev. Adrian McHugh, a Roman Catholic priest, and 120 guests at the Church of Saint Aidan in Williston Park, N.Y.
Among the guests were the bride’s parents, Deseriee Kennedy and George White Jr. of Jericho, N.Y. The bride’s father is the interim dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at York College, which is part of the City University of New York, and her mother is a professor of law at Touro Law Center in Central Islip, N.Y.
Also in attendance were the groom’s parents, Anna Mahoney and Charles Mahoney of Huntington, N.Y. The groom’s father is a district manager for Waste Connections, a waste management company in New York. His mother is a founding partner of SecureShred, a shredding service, also in New York.
“I married my best friend,” the groom said. “I only wish I had met her sooner.”